Power and Dissent in Imperial Japan: Three Forms of Political Engagement

By Hiromi Sasamoto-Collins

This volume examines the careers and intellectual positions of three prominent Japanese “dissidents” in the later Imperial period – Minobe Tatsukichi, Sakai Toshihiko and Saitō Takao – as individual responses to the new forms of authority that appeared after the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

The principles to which each adhered – the rule of law, socialist egalitarianism, and representative government – contributed to the new ideas about authority and the individual in post-Restoration Japan. They also remain fundamental (at least in theory) in today’s Japanese polity and society. The study reaffirms the serious limitations of the pre-war Japanese political system, its structural and institutional problems, and deep-rooted ambivalence about democratic change. But it also confirms the birth of an alternative tradition in which individuals began to define and sponsor the processes of national self-regulation. This book traces the perspectives of three such individuals who chose to contest the new power arrangements through their writings and political activities.

Highlights

First study of modern Japanese political dissent to combine modernist theory, close textual analysis and socio-economic history.

Presents original Japanese material that has not been fully explored.

Links three dissenting subjects who have yet to be jointly considered.

About the author

Dr Hiromi Sasamoto-Collins is a former lecturer in modern Japanese history at Durham University, and is currently a tutor in Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.